When Candida started to quieten down, Sharif leaned over and handed her a piece of paper with musical notation - a song was written on it. ‘I wrote this for you, I guess to say goodbye. I was going to send it to you, but you’re here now. You can take it with you, if you want.’

Candida looked at the scrawled notation and scribbles. So this was it, then. This was all the explanation that she was going to get for the end of their relationship, some unintelligible code that she was expected to decipher. ‘You know I can’t read music,’ she said, not bothering to add that he also knew she had never been able to read his chaotic handwriting. She held the song back out to him, and when he didn’t take it she put it down on the bed between them. ‘You’d better play it to me.’

Sharif hesitated. ‘I don’t think so; I don’t think I can …’

‘Sharif, please!’ Candida insisted. ‘It’s the least you can do. You can’t just give me something you know I can’t understand and expect me to trot off happily with it.’

Sharif sighed, and nodded. ‘If I play it to you, will you just leave?’

Candida nodded, crossing her toes in her sandals while she wiped the tears from her red and swollen eyes.

Sharif started playing the same set of melancholy chords that he had picked out just a few moments before, and began to sing very softly, deliberately looking down at the neck of his guitar, and not anywhere near Candida at all.

’Dark clouds of depression, they leak from every pore

Our loved ones’ lies and repression, can’t protect us any more

I promised to stay with you

And to keep away the pain

But we didn’t know what we were doing

And so we hurt ourselves again.’

Sharif glanced up at Candida briefly, to see her staring at her feet, and biting her lip furiously. He looked down swiftly before she could catch him and began to sing the chorus:

There were dark clouds of desire, when we lay so close in bed

Now the dark clouds of depression, have left our memories for dead

And when we breathed,

We infected the air,

And I could cry,

We didn’t know enough to care

I knew you loved me, though it wasn’t what you said,

But I won’t let us have a breakdown

I’ll let it have me instead

I’ll let it have me instead.’

Sharif was going to begin the second verse, when Candida spoke. ‘Stop,’ she said, ‘please stop.’